› Liner notes

‹ Liner notes

• It's hard to mix on a train, even with good headphones.  Questions like are the subs too quiet or too loud? can only be answered by speculation until you get home, where pressing play could just as easily result in no bass whatsoever or the studio monitors immediately blowing down all standing structures like the 808 of Jericho.

• Lesson learned: It's helpful to compress JSRF-style dialogue snippets to a nearly ridiculous extreme.  Otherwise, you'll probably hear only hints of their voices until the occasional lucky gap in the mix.  They're still audible, but the overall effect of their presence ends up being what I'd describe as "borderline-liminal"―like momentarily noticing the faint cries of your ancestors, beckoning from the other end of a long, dark tunnel that also happens to be bursting with subway engines roaring back and forth and blaring their horns because it's rush hour.

• In a pinch, a crowd of people cheering "Happy Birthday!" can be chopped and distorted into a scratchy little rhythm instrument

• A hugely disproportionate number of blues performers I've sampled from the mid-1920s seem to have died about a decade later.

› Library of Congress samples used

‹ Library of Congress samples used

• Piano: Triflin' man (1923), performed by Clarence Johnson ― License: Public Domain

› freesound.org audio samples used

‹ freesound.org audio samples used

• Rock beat loop 7 - busy kick.wav by bigjoedrummer  License: CC0

• silica gel bag shaker 105bpm by leaving.february  License: CC0

• Happy Birthday Crowd by theuned  License: CC0

› archive.org samples used

‹ archive.org samples used

• Dialogue: "Just add to milk and beat, in minutes!," sampled from Classic Television Commercials (Part VI), at ~01:32 ― License: Public Domain (determined by the Prelinger Archives)

• Dialogue: "Oh, brother," sampled from Blonde Ice (1948), at ~51:17 ― License: Public Domain

• Dialogue: "They're bad little men," sampled from Blonde Ice (1948), at ~57:01 ― License: Public Domain